SEO Consultant Ireland

As in fishing the search engine optimization is done before you see any results. Whatever you use to catch your fish you do need to make your gear wet before you will catch a single fish. In SEO you need to write your copy (bait), publish it to the search engines (sink it). If your bait is good (interesting content represented in the search engine with a interesting title and a sentence below it), and you place it where there are a lot of fishes (top of the rankings for your relevant search phrases) you will catch a lot (of visitors to your web site).

So what is your bait stinks?

In the SEO worlds your bait is the representation of your web site in the search engine.

The page TITLE tag is the most important since it is printed in the top line of your sites listing and is also a link to your site. This needs to be catchy, and inviting.

The META is the place to write your tag lines and marketing messages, since this text displays often as a next two lines of the site listing in the search engine results page.

URL is the bottom line of your sites listing and if your domain name, or the further directory and or filenames have sense your site listing will attract more visitors. People will simply click more on your link in the search engines.

Note that the search engines, and Google does this as well, prints the words a visitor have used in the search phrase bold on the search result page. How to use this feature to your advantage? Use the keywords you want visitors for in your Title META and on your text on the page. Google will do the rest for you. It will bold each instance of the each keyword searched for in the search results page, highlighting those searched keywords wherever those are found in the results. It is a nice usability feature, and Google obviously uses it. Remember they have Jakub Nielsen in the Board!

What if your fishing gear stinks?

You created your page with a relevant, interesting and inviting page TITLE. Your META description is beautiful and sounds like a most expensive marketing message and you made your URLs readable like a text. Great! Fishes are biting! Visitors are clicking on your listings in the search results pages like crazy. You have lots of visitors and all of them are flowing to your site free from the search engines. Then again, your sales (if you are selling directly on the site) are absolutely flat. The fish are biting but you don’t bring anything home!?

Your fishing gear is your landing page. You have the fish here, and you need to get it out of the water. If your gear is not mach for the fish, you will lose it. The same is with our web site visitors. If they do not find exactly what they have been looking for on your site they will leave.

So what exactly are your visitors that came from the search engines looking for?

Remember that you have actually brought those visitors to our site. Google cannot send you the visitors by itself. You need to write, publish, and link to your site so that the Google can find your content and bring you the fish. Oops no. The visitors. Right.

Your bait worked. Your site listing in the search results page was relevant to the search phrase the visitor used and your TITLE meta and the URL invited the visitor to visit your site. What is he looking for? He is looking for EXACTLY what you wrote in your TITLE, META (or the snippet of your page text copy) and the URL. To make the visitor stay on the page you need to have the content on that page that the visitor is looking for. It sounds simple but isn’t always so in the real life. What this tells you actually is the old SEO rule that says that every page of the web site should have a unique TITLE. And the next step, if you want to convert that visitor – make sure he does not leave immediately (bounce), you need to have the exact match of the page TITEL and META description with the content of each page. Yes it means the unique META Description, just in case you have been wondering (or the fish is gone!).

http://www.irishjobsinireland.com/

How important is a domain name for your web site?
Hat impact will the presence of the important search phrases within your domain name have on your web traffic?
Is it important to have a search phrases in the domain name?

All interesting questions. The SEO gurus disagree completely on this, so here are the findings of the real life test of the site: http://www.irishjobsinireland.com/.

Here is a site that has a very descriptive domain name: Irish Jobs in Ireland. It contains the phrases Irish Jobs, and Jobs in Ireland. A site is published about a year ago. The site has some content as well. The number of sites are linking to it, so both Google and Yahoo visit it from time to time.

After a year the Google PR is still 0.

For the phrase: Irish Jobs in Ireland it is only on the 8th spot in Google.ie. For the Irish Jobs or Jobs in Ireland… it is not on the first page.

The concussion is that the search phrase in the domain name helps, but alone cannot do anything meaningful to your web site traffic from the search engines.

The vast majority of the web sites have almost no traffic at all. How about yours?

Almost anyone who sad published a web site realised after the hype in the office quietened, that there is something missing. There was no visitors to the web site. You learned to be patient, and have been watching the web logs, but time is passing and there is still just a ‘flat line’ A few visitors, mostly from your own IP. When a first referral from a search engine showed up, it gave you hope, but in reality the keyword used was you domain name. Months pass by and still nothing really. No visitors, and a spider visiting a home page and a few more pages only, once in a week or a month.

Then you realise, I need to do something to bring this visitors to my site. SEO is the magic word there. Let’s invest in it, but…

How much does SEO cost?

I have been asked that question a million times so far. And still there is no definite answer, but here is the sentence that made me thinking today:

The budget for marketing a site in the first month should be equal to the budget for building the site in the first place.

To anyone who has just purchased a new web site this is most likely shocking to say at least. You have paid through the roof for the web site, and now you need t spend as much into online marketing of it. And all that in the first month only? What happens the next month, and any other month later on?!

SEO is Expensive

Paying a few dollars per inbound link to a company in Asia is cheap. And every day you receive an offer for such services in your inbox. Just check your SPAM or Junk folders. Will that bring you any good (visitors). Quite unlikely.

SEO is Time Consuming

A SEO Consultant will most likely have to rewrite the majority of the content on the site. In some cases the whole site (code) will have to be replaced by something the search engines can read and understand. The top SEO Consultants will if at all possible look into replacing the whole web site with a completely new one. The look and feel will be the same, the content will be retained, and a lot of new one added (in most cases), but the code will be completely replaced in the end product.

Is SEO for You?

SEO is not for everyone. That is the fact. SEO is a viable investment to any web site owner who will make a return on investment from the direct on indirect sales from the traffic on the web site.

What is your SEO Budget?

Some three months ago I wrote the post about the speed of Google – defining a test on how long does Google really take to place a new web site high (first page) for the relevant search phrases. We all know that Google will fairly quickly display a web site high in the search engine results pages (SERP) after it initially finds the page – for the search phrase that is exactly the same as the domain name of the web page. But getting listed for the other keywords is something that Google really does not rush to do quickly. Exceptions are of course pages PING’ed directly to Google, or submitted via the XML Sitemaps. But both of those tend to have a short ‘life span’ high in the SERP.

So three months after the publishing of this site SeoConsultant.ie – the Google Webmaster Console is showing its rankings in the SERP:

Note that all those results are still obtained with the ‘Pages from Ireland’ option selected for those search phrases.

The Content is The King! –

Everyone working in the search engine optimisation industry (SEO) is asking themselves the same question: Is onsite optimisation more important than the offsite optimisation today? Are those inbound links from other sites really crucial in determining the sites ranking? Should one invest his time to do the optimisation of the page itself at all if the ranking is determined by the number and the quality of the inbound links?

Here is a test to answer to the question:

1. Register a new domain name.
2. Install some blogging software on it.
3. Set up your blogging software so that is sends a PING to the search engines when a new post is published.
4. Setup and configure the XML Sitemap generation and automatic submission after a new post is published on a blog.
5. Setup the SEO optimisation of your blog posts page – Title, Meta, URL rewriting, H1, H2,…
6. Write your first article with a Title of your blog post as the phrase you want to rank high in Google. For the purpose of this test take an easy 4 or 5 word phrase.
7. Wait from a few minutes to a few days, make a search for the phrase that is a tile of your blog post.
8. If everything is done right – you should have your blog post listed on the No 1. In Google within a week of registering a domain.

Note: there isn’t a single inbound link to that domain at all, and jet it ranks on top of the search for the specific phrase.

Conclusion:

Inbound links are important for your web site search ranking. But inbound links, regardless of their quantity or their quality (importance of the sites linking to you, and text they link to you with) cannot replace the content on your site. The test above proves the opposite scenario – where there are absolutely none inbound links, and the content on a well optimised web page itself made the page to rank on top in the search engine for the relevant keyword.

The Content is The King!

The Canonical URL issue that is talked about a lot lately since even Google itself it has a huge impact on the search engine ranking of your web page is all about defining one page and one URL of your web site to help the search engines define what the real Home of your web site is, and pass on all the links to any other pages to this one Home page.

Matt wrote about it even back in 2006 here: SEO advice: url canonicalization

Some people got it, some did not. Some people take advantage of it and some do not. IT’s a bit like saying:

Some companies care about their ranking in Google and some not.

There is one domain (company) that actually took the canonical URL issue to the whole new level. What they have done is they have created two completely different web sites that show in the two versions of their URL. When the domain is accessed with a domain name that contains the ‘www’ part in it –one site shows up, and the same domain name without the ‘www’ part of the address shows a completely different web site.

At first it looked like a mistake made on the web server configuration, but contacting the company in question revealed that that was actually done intentionally.

An interesting and original approach to URL canonicalization. I do not remember anyone ever trying anything similar jet. Could they be on to something? It is clear that both versions of the web site will dilute the value the Google assigns. The Google Page Rank (PR) will be lower on both sites than it would be if one site would have been redirected to the other. The search engine ranking of both versions will again be lower than if the redirection was in place. Also by having the completely different content and the code on the two versions of the site, Google will have to index and therefore rank them completely independently.

There are no obvious benefits of doing splitting your web site into the two different versions. On the other implementing the two versions of the web site will definitely hurt your Google rankings.

The user / visitor of the site will also get extremely surprised with the two so different versions on the web site. Different company name, address, email, phone, fax number and everything really. It does really look like another company. It is only the call to their IT department that assured of their intentional ‘splitting’ of the domain name, and creation of the canonical URL.

A new domain registered and submitted to Google will show in the search engine results pages (SERP) in 22 hours.

This is the answer to the SEO Speed Test: SEOConsultant.ie in Google.ie?

The first milestone was to got the SEO Consultant web stite (SEOConsultant.ie) listed in the Google’s search engine results pages. It took 22 hours.

The next milestone is to get the SEO Consultant web site listed on the First page results in Google.

After the first indexing the domain SEO Consultant domain is ranked number one and two for the domain name ‘’seoconsultant’.
http://www.google.ie/search?&q=seoconsultant

It is also ranked in the first page on the 7th place for the keyphrase ‘seo consultant’
http://www.google.ie/search?&q=seo+consultant

For the same phrase ‘seo consultant’ when a option ‘pages from Ireland’ is selected the SEO Consultant web page is ranked number one:
http://www.google.ie/search?&q=seo+consultant&meta=cr%3DcountryIE

The conclusion of this fist part of the test it that it takes Google about 22 hours to include the domain in its index from the submission time. The next goal of the SEO Speed Test: SEOConsultant.ie in Google.ie? is to see the length of time required to list the domain on the first page for the part of the domain name – the word, or the abbreviation to be more precise – ‘SEO’.